hi guys

Long time no see! Some of you all might have been wondering where I’ve been (maybe?). I kind of disappeared this summer, at least by my usual standards. I haven't been posting as much, I wasn’t writing much here at all, and I definitely wasn’t doing my normal thing of documenting every outfit, restaurant, train ride, exhibition, cocktail, random street corner, or mildly interesting ceiling I came across.

At the end of 2025, when I sat down to write my goals for 2026, I had one word written in all caps: GROW. Grow The Art Girl. Grow Opusfolio. Grow my career, my brand, my online presence, my relationships, my life. Just grow, grow, grow. Guess what.. I did. So far, 2026 has been one of the most exciting and intense years of my life. I’ve spent the past 8 months building, pitching, writing, working, creating, networking, figuring things out as I went, and staying up until 3 a.m. because there was always one more email to send or one more idea I was convinced absolutely could not wait until morning. I wouldn’t trade any of this. I love being ambitious and having a million ideas. In this day and age, having ideas is currency and I’m grateful that I haven’t lost that spark within myself. Building things from scratch fills my cup and makes me feel very accomplished.

however

Somewhere along the way this year, I realized that I had become so focused on building my life and growing it that I wasn’t actually living it.

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After pitching my tech startup Opusfolio in May at the Sotheby’s Enterprise Studio, right before I left for my European summer extravaganza (take #3), I knew I needed to step away for a minute. I wasn’t completely burnt out, and I probably would have resisted calling it that anyway, but I could feel myself getting really close to it. There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly being “on” when your career and your creativity are so intertwined with your identity. When your job is also your passion, it becomes incredibly easy to convince yourself that working more is the same thing as living more. And when you work in a creative industry, there is this strange expectation that you should always be producing something: A thought, a post, a newsletter, a reel, a trend, a photoshoot, a new idea. There is always another thing to make and another version of yourself to put online. Even taking a vacation somehow became another form of work. Whenever I decided I was moving back to Italy for the summer, all I could think about was “How am I going to brand this?” and “Is this going to make sense to my followers?” WTF Tahlia???

I would go somewhere beautiful and immediately think about the content I could make from it. What should I wear? What photos should I take? What is the carousel? What song is going to be on the Reel? Is this a Story or a feed post? Should I save this for later? And suddenly you’re sitting in the most beautiful place in the world thinking about the algorithm. All of this made me realize…

i completely lost the plot

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how does one get the plot back?

When I wrote my last article about moving to Italy again, I think a part of me already knew what the next few months were going to look like. I was heading into the summer knowing I had earned a little time off. I had just spent the better part of the year building, working, pitching, creating, and trying to make all of these big ideas in my head into something real. By the time I left for Europe, I knew I didn’t want to spend the summer thinking about what came next and I wanted to actually be there for it. At the time, I don’t think I fully understood how much I needed that. I just knew that after such a full year, I wanted to give myself permission to slow down for a second and catch up.

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So this summer was going to be about trying something different. I wanted to travel without constantly thinking about how I was going to package the experience afterward. I wanted to go to dinner and not immediately think about whether I had gotten the photo (iykyk). I wanted to walk through a city and let myself actually look at it instead of seeing it through the camera on my phone. I wanted to be somewhere beautiful and not feel this tiny internal pressure to prove that I was there.

this was way harder than i expected

Social media is such a strange thing because I genuinely do love it and I love creating. I love seeing what everyone else is doing, too. I love travel content, fashion content, art content, the absurd little corners of TikTok that somehow become the most entertaining thing you’ve ever seen. I am not anti-internet and I am certainly not anti-content—I literally built my career around it. But I think there is a difference between creating because something inspires you and experiencing something primarily because you know you can create from it. If you are a creator please listen to this: You need to remember that difference. So I went to Europe at the end of May, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself be a little unavailable. I took trains, wandered around cities, went to museums, sat at long dinners, wore outfits that I loved, drank things I couldn’t pronounce, spent entire afternoons doing absolutely nothing productive, and let the days happen without constantly trying to capture them.

i’m so thankful for my friends

It’s important to note that knowing you need a break and actually knowing HOW to take one are two very different things. I’ll share a more personal story for the sake of relatability. I spent almost this entire summer with one of my best friends, Janis. Janis is online, but she isn’t a creator by profession, which I think is part of why she has such a refreshing relationship with the internet. She also doubles as my fairy godmother, unofficial life coach, and one of the wisest people I’ve ever met. She’s a Southern belle, but is also kind of a bulldog, which is why I trust her so much. If you are lucky enough to find a Southern belle bulldog friend, KEEP HER. I digress.

We have this running joke that part of being a good friend is being willing to tell each other the truth, even when the truth is not particularly fun to hear. Especially when it hurts a little. At the beginning of the summer, I was struggling more than I wanted to admit with being offline. I was getting frustrated when things didn’t go exactly as planned, when a day didn’t produce the perfect photo, when a moment wasn’t quite as aesthetically perfect as I had imagined it would be. As someone who will, under almost any circumstance, find a way to get the perfect photo, this was genuinely difficult for me. Janis eventually called me out on it. Not gently, either I should add. She reminded me that we were having the kind of summer people dream about. We were traveling together, seeing beautiful places, eating amazing food, laughing until we couldn’t breathe, and having experiences that we would remember for the rest of our lives. I was doing all of that, and I was letting myself get distracted by whether or not I had the picture to prove it. She basically told me, in much more Southern-belle-with-a-bulldog-energy terms, to get over myself and be grateful that I was there.

It sounds simple, but it low-key smacked me in the face because she was SO right. At some point, social media has become such a normal part of how I experienced my life that I had stopped noticing how much it was influencing the experience itself. I wasn’t just living something and then deciding to share it. I was subconsciously experiencing things with the possibility of sharing them already sitting somewhere in the back of my mind. I think there is a subtle but important difference between those two things. There is nothing wrong with wanting the photo. There is nothing wrong with making the reel, putting together the carousel, or capturing the beautiful dinner. I love all of those things. But there is something sad about needing the photo to validate that the moment was beautiful in the first place. The whole point of being with someone you love, somewhere you’ve dreamed about being, is that you are there. That should be enough. The picture is supposed to be the souvenir, not the experience itself.

That conversation with Janis became a bit of a turning point for me. I stopped worrying so much about getting everything right. I let our plans change. I let photos be imperfect. I let certain moments exist completely undocumented. Ironically, I think I ended up having a much better summer because of it. There were moments I probably would have been annoyed about before that I now remember as some of my favorites. The blurry photos, the dinners that lasted too long, the days where we did absolutely nothing, the places where I didn’t get the “shot,” the moments that never made it onto Instagram and therefore, in some strange way, became entirely ours. It reminded me that there is a whole category of memories that don’t need an audience. Some of the best parts of my summer are the ones that no one else will ever see.

moving on to now

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started to feel like myself again. This wasn’t necessarily a more successful version of myself or a more aesthetically pleasing version of myself or a version of myself that had more followers. For the first time in a long time, I was just me, Tahlia. I think that is one of the things no one really talks about when they talk about taking time off in a creative career. Rest is not always about being physically tired. Sometimes you need distance from the constant output of your own identity. You need a little silence around yourself so you can hear what you actually think. Especially when you are young and trying to build something, there is always this fear that if you slow down, someone else will pass you: Someone else will post the idea first, someone else will get the opportunity, the algorithm will forget you, your audience will move on, you will become irrelevant. And maybe some of that is true. But I am starting to think that constantly trying to outrun irrelevance is a pretty sad and terrible way to live.

The funny thing is, I don’t feel behind at all. Actually, I feel ahead. I have more ideas than I did before I left and I felt creatively refreshed. I am excited to write again. I am ready and want to work. I want to keep building.

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I think I had spent so much time believing that rest was something I had to earn after I finished everything that I forgot there is no such thing as finishing everything. There will always be another project, another meeting, another pitch, another post, another email, another goal. That is the nature of the life I have chosen, and I love that about it. But I also want a life that exists outside of what I am building. That was one of my biggest goals for 2026, too. Not just growth, but presence. What is the point of building a beautiful life if you are too busy documenting it to actually notice that you’re living it?

So, I took some time off to rest. Now, it’s game time. I’m coming back into fall feeling more grounded, more inspired, and honestly more excited than I have felt in a while. There is so much I want to do, so much I want to build, and so much I want to share with you guys.

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but I’m taking one thing with me from this summer

I don’t want my life to only exist in retrospect, through the photos I took or the posts I made or the stories I told about it afterward. I want to remember what it felt like to be there. I want to make things because I am inspired, not because I am scared of disappearing. This is exactly the type of growth I needed this year, I just didn’t know it before. Sometimes growing means building bigger—Sometimes it also means stepping away. Sometimes it means putting your phone down, ordering another glass of wine, looking around the table at the people you love, and realizing that this is the part you were working so hard for in the first place. So yeah, I disappeared for a little while. I was busy living. Thank God that I did.

I’m so excited to be back <3

With love,

The Art Girl

There is something innately emotional about Mark Rothko’s paintings. Maybe it is the simplicity of the shapes, the bold and almost glowing colors, or the sheer scale of his canvases that demand your attention. But every time I stand in front of a Rothko, something shifts for me. His paintings have this rare ability to quiet everything around you and make you focus entirely on the present moment. As soon as I landed in Rome this summer, all I could think about was getting to Florence asap to see his solo exhibition at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. I haven’t had time to make the trek just yet, but if you’re in Firenze at any point this summer… you definitely should.

buy a ticket here!

Rothko’s work is often associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement (i.e. Pollock, Krasner, Frankenthaler), a group of artists who moved away from traditional representation and instead focused on emotion, gesture, and the experience of the viewer. Unlike many of his contemporaries who embraced expressive brushstrokes and chaotic compositions, Rothko took a much quieter approach. He stripped painting down to its most essential elements: color, space, and feeling.

What fascinated me most while learning about Rothko was realizing how intentional every decision in his paintings was. The placement of each shape, the relationship between colors, and even the scale of the canvas were carefully considered. These works were never meant to be passive decorations. Rothko believed that art could create a moment of connection between the artist and the viewer, specifically one that existed beyond words.

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Born Marcus Rothkowitz in present day Latvia at the beginning of the 20th century, Rothko immigrated to the United States when he was only 10 years old, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon. He later attended Yale University before moving to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. Like so many artists who came to New York searching for something bigger than themselves, Rothko was drawn to the energy, experimentation, and endless possibilities of the city.

Early in his career, Rothko explored different styles and influences, but by the late 1940s, he had truly found his voice. This was when he developed the style that he is most recognized for today: two or three soft edged rectangles stacked almost weightlessly on top of one another, appearing as if they are floating against the canvas.

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At first glance, his works may seem minimal. But the longer you look, the more they reveal themselves. Rothko carefully placed different shades and layers of color in conversation with one another, creating paintings that feel almost alive. His colors do not just sit on the canvas. They seem to breathe, glow, and change depending on where you are standing.

Which brings me to the question I always ask when introducing someone to Rothko: how can something so abstract create such a deeply personal emotional response?

Fair question.

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I know that there’s vulnerability in being honest about all of this, especially online.

If you’ve followed me for a while, chances are you’ve probably watched the last few years of my life unfold through a screen. You’ve seen the museums, the gallery openings, the paintings, the partnerships, the trips, the fashion week invites, the euro summers. You’ve seen the full highlight reel. Don’t get me wrong, those moments were real and they happened. I was incredibly grateful for them then and I’m incredibly grateful for them now.

What you don’t see in an aesthetic photo dump is what happens when the camera is put away. You don’t see the anxiety, the uncertainty, the nights where I was staring at the ceiling wondering if I was making the right decisions. The moments where you’re questioning whether you’re talented enough, smart enough, disciplined enough, or deserving enough to build the life you say you want.

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I think about the girl who graduated from Baylor in 2023 a lot. At the time, I thought I had everything figured out, like most postgrads do I think (?). But it’s funny because in hindsight I had absolutely nothing figured out. All I knew was that I had gotten into Sotheby’s Institute for my MA, was moving to New York in the fall, and was going to Italy for the summer to chase art and a good story. I knew that I wanted a life that looked different from what everyone around me was doing and wanted. Pretty much all of my friends were settling into jobs, relationships/marriages, and lives that made complete sense. They had plans, structure and certainty.

I had a one-way ticket to Italy and an unhealthy amount of confidence.

So I graduated, packed up my life, and moved to Florence. Looking back, I think Florence changed my life in ways I didn’t even realize at the time. I spent that entire summer chasing new cities and exhibitions across Europe. I was taking trains to places I had never been to before just because there was an artist or a museum I wanted to see. I was saying yes to everything; Every opportunity, conversation, and situation was going to be a yes from me.

I thought I was there to celebrate my graduation and “carpe-diem” as I remember saying so much that summer. In reality, I was learning how to trust myself. When you’re twenty-one years old and halfway across the world, there is nobody coming to save you and nobody is telling you where to go. Nobody is telling you what decision to make. Every day was an exercise in figuring it out.

And I loved it.

Then came 2024. To this day, being admitted into the Peggy Guggenheim Fellowship Program remains one of the greatest honors of my life. Not necessarily because of the title itself, but because of what it represented. For the first time, I felt like all of the crazy decisions I had been making were finally leading somewhere. So I moved back to Italy, this time to Venice, and this time with my little sister Ellison.

If you’ve ever spent time in Venice, you know how easy it is to romanticize it. The city feels completely fictional and makes zero logical or logistical sense but it’s so mesmerizing you choose to ignore the issues that arise from those issues. Every morning felt like stepping into a painting and every evening looked like it belonged in a movie. On paper, it was probably the best summer of my life. I was living in Venice. I was working at one of the most important modern art museums in the world. Traveling constantly with my little sister. Meeting incredible people from anywhere & everywhere. Building relationships that would eventually become foundational to my career. The photos from that summer are beautiful.

What the photos don’t show is that I was struggling. A lot.

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That summer taught me a lesson I wasn’t prepared to learn: external success and internal peace are not the same thing. You can be having the summer everyone dreams about and still be hurting. You can be standing in one of the most beautiful places on earth and still feel completely lost. You can get everything you thought you wanted and still realize that something isn’t right. For a long time I felt guilty admitting that and honestly embarrassed. I thought gratitude and struggle couldn’t exist in the same place. Now I know they can coexist. In fact, they usually do.

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When I moved back to New York after Venice, life got very real very fast. It was the complete opposite of spritzes and sunshine everyday. Everything felt like a huge fat slap in the face. And can we talk about that for a second? Why does nobody warn you how weird your early twenties are? Everyone always talks about college—everyone talks about high school—everyone talks about your thirties. Nobody talks about being twenty-two and trying to become a REAL functioning person and adult. You’re making decisions that affect your future while simultaneously having no idea what you’re doing. You’re building a career while also trying to figure out who you are. To make matters more dramatic, New York has a way of exposing every insecurity you’ve ever had and naturally I picked the hardest city in the world to adjust to comfortably… which is so like me. Always choosing the more complicated path. Haha.

I genuinely think New York humbled me more than any person, institution, or experience ever could. During my time in Venice and after I got back to New York, for the first time in my life, I experienced real failure and heartbreak and real consequences and real disappointment. This was not the kind of disappointment you feel when you don’t get what you want. This was the gut wrenching kind that fundamentally changes how you see yourself forever and ever and is absolutely impossible to forget. I had my first real crash out. Several, actually. And while I wouldn’t wish some of those experiences on anyone, they forced me to grow in ways comfort never could.

When I thought things couldn’t get worse, along came 2025.

Let’s just say, there was no euro summer.

While that might sound silly on the surface, it represented something much bigger for me. For the first time in years, I didn’t have a beautiful European backdrop to distract me from whatever was happening in my life. There was no boarding pass waiting in my inbox, no apartment in Italy, no exciting adventure around the corner. Instead, I had to stay put and face things head-on. Looking back, I know that it was exactly what I needed.

For so long, movement had become my coping mechanism. If I felt restless, I traveled. If I felt uncertain, I buried myself in work. If I felt overwhelmed, I convinced myself that a change of scenery would somehow make everything make sense. But eventually life has a way of sitting you down and demanding your attention. 2025 forced me to do that. It forced me to examine parts of myself that I had spent years avoiding. It forced me to take accountability for my habits, my decisions, my relationships, and the ways I responded to adversity. It wasn’t glamorous, and it certainly wasn’t fun, but it was necessary. In many ways, it was the year that softly laid the foundation for everything that would come next.

Amidst all that struggle, I stopped looking for someone else to tell me who I should be, and I grew. I learned to stop waiting for life to magically become easier. I learned to stop believing that confidence was something you were born with. I realized confidence is earned:

• You earn it every time you keep a promise to yourself,

• You earn it every time you do something hard.

• You earn it every time you survive something you thought would break you.

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Which brings us to the current, 2026 has felt like a complete 180. By NO means has life suddenly became easier for me, but I now approach everything differently. Over the Christmas and New Year’s season, I sat down and made a promise to myself. I was tired of waiting for confidence to magically appear. I was tired of hoping things would change without changing my own behavior. More than anything, I was tired of underestimating what I was capable of accomplishing. This was cannon.

I told myself that this would be the year I fully locked in and committed. I wanted to scale my advisory business, grow my platform, become a stronger friend and partner, take better care of my mental health, and create a life that felt aligned with the person I wanted to become. For once, I wasn’t going to just write those goals down and forget about them a month later. I was going to (*bleep*) follow through.

This year has brought opportunities that I once only dreamed about. I have 4x-ed my advisory, launched my tech company for art advisors called Opusfolio, worked with brands I genuinely admire, traveled to new places, met incredible people, and continued building a career that feels deeply meaningful to me.

Naturally, there have still been challenges. Life doesn’t suddenly become perfect because you decide to have a positive attitude. But I’ve learned that happiness has far less to do with circumstances than it does with your perspective. The difference between this year and previous years isn’t that nothing difficult has happened—The difference is that I’ve learned to trust myself through it.

A month ago, I was sitting in my childhood bedroom at my mom’s house when I made a decision that felt different than all the ones before it. I was going back to Europe. But this time:

• Not because I was escaping anything.

• Not because I was trying to find myself.

But because for the first time, I’m not totally lost. To be clear: this is not an Eat Pray Love summer. It’s not about becoming someone new—It’s about arriving as someone I have become. As I write this, somewhere between Italy and France, watching the Mediterranean flash outside my train window, and I can physically in my bones feel how full circle everything has become. I don’t know exactly where this summer is going yet. I don’t know what opportunities are waiting around the corner, what conversations I haven’t had yet, or what my life will look like six months from now.

But for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel the need to know or WANT to know. What I do know is that I am moving in the right direction. That’s enough for me right now. More than anything, I am proud of myself. I’m proud of the girl who left Texas with a suitcase and too many dreams to count and so many people saying “she’ll never do that.” Proud of the girl who moved to New York and learned everything the hard way but loved and trusted the process. Proud of the girl who stayed when it got difficult instead of leaving.

I am so proud of the woman I am becoming.

For all the places art has taken me, all the cities, all the museums, all the exhibitions, all the opportunities, the most meaningful journey has been becoming myself. The purpose of this article was not to tell the sad parts of my story, it’s to remind you that the best part of the story is still ahead.

With love,

The Art Girl

the fairs, openings, and auctions everyone is talking about

Happy Art Week to all who celebrate! NYC Art Week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Reservations become impossible. Black SUVs idle outside gallery dinners in Chelsea until midnight. Collectors suddenly develop impossible schedules that somehow include six fairs, three previews, two dinners, and a studio visit… all before noon? Uptown, auction houses quietly hang works that could each buy an apartment downtown. Below 23rd Street, emerging galleries stay crowded long after closing because nobody wants to leave the conversation yet. For one week, the entire art world compresses into New York City.

Art Week has become its own ecosystem, it combines between cultural pilgrimage, social marathon, and market spectacle. It’s cool because museum curators, young painters, mega collectors, advisors, celebrities, fashion people, and exhausted gallery associates all move through the same rooms at the same time. Deals happen over coffee and museum acquisitions are discussed at dinner. Someone sees a painting at 11 a.m. and by 4 p.m. the work is gone.

But what makes New York different from every other art capital is that the city itself is part of the experience. You aren’t just attending a fair here. You move through neighborhoods, through openings, through chance encounters on sidewalks and crowded elevators and late-night dinners where everyone is pretending not to talk about the market while absolutely talking about the market.

This year’s Art Week arrives at an especially interesting moment. The frenzy and speculation that defined parts of the post-pandemic market have cooled, and in its place there seems to be a renewed interest in artists with depth, rigor, and long-term relevance. Across the fairs, galleries, and auction previews, there is a noticeable return to work that feels serious without losing energy or ambition.

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from Frieze and TEFAF to downtown openings and the major evening sales, here is everything worth seeing during new york art week 2026!

1. the fairs

Frieze New York

Frieze New York returns to The Shed from May 13-17 and remains the defining fair of the week. The fair has become smaller and more refined over the last few years, which has ultimately made it stronger. Booths are more intentional, presentations are tighter, and there is less of the overwhelming excess that used to define large-scale art fairs. This year’s exhibitor list includes many of the industry’s biggest names, including Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, White Cube, and Thaddaeus Ropac.

What Frieze does particularly well is balance market confidence with cultural relevance. Alongside major blue-chip presentations, the fair continues to foreground younger galleries and international programs that bring a sense of discovery into the mix. The conversations happening at Frieze often end up shaping the tone of the entire week.

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TEFAF New York

If Frieze is the pulse of the contemporary market, TEFAF is its cool European uncle. Held inside the Park Avenue Armory, TEFAF feels quieter, slower, and deeply sophisticated. It is one of the few fairs where visitors can move naturally between Old Masters, twentieth-century design, antiquities, modern painting, and contemporary work without it feeling disjointed.

The atmosphere at TEFAF is unlike anywhere else during the week. The lighting is soft, the crowds are calm, and conversations tend to revolve around provenance, scholarship, and rarity rather than immediacy. It is the type of fair where people genuinely stop and look. This year’s edition includes nearly 90 exhibitors and strong presentations from galleries including Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Berggruen, and Lévy Gorvy Dayan.

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some of my favorite looks from this year and the artist they pay homage to.

Although I was hoping for a bit more drama from this year’s Met Gala guests, I was very happy to see that at least a few of them took the theme seriously. I’m going to rate this year a 7.9/10. I can’t wait for my own Met Gala moment, I can assure you that it won’t disappoint!

With love,

The Art Girl

There are a few artists I can trace all the way back to the beginning of how I learned to look at art. René Magritte is at the very top of that list. I have this really vivid memory of standing in front of one of his paintings as a kid, not in a grand museum moment but in a slightly distracted/wandering way you experience things when you’re young, and then suddenly being completely stopped. The piece was The Son of Man, and I remember feeling almost annoyed at it at first.

Why can’t I see his face? Why is that apple just hovering there like it owns the place? Then it clicked for me. I realized that not knowing was the whole point. My weird frustration then turned into curiosity, and that curiosity turned into a full on obsession with surrealism that I still haven’t grown out of.

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Magritte’s life reads like a study in contrasts, which makes sense when you look at his work. He was born in Belgium in 1898 and experienced a childhood marked by instability and tragedy, most notably the death of his mother, who drowned when he was a teenager. There is a persistent story that her face was covered by her nightgown when her body was found, and while historians debate the accuracy of that detail, the imagery of obscured faces shows up again and again in his paintings. It is hard not to feel that something deeply psychological is at play.

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Yet as an adult, Magritte lived a relatively quiet, almost conventional life. He dressed plainly, worked steadily, and approached painting like a 9-5. That tension between the ordinary and the impossible is exactly what makes his work so powerful and knowing that piece of his story is so important when you’re studying his oeuvre.

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one of my favorite female artists.

The first time you see a Helen Frankenthaler painting, it doesn’t really announce itself. There’s no obvious focal point, no dramatic gesture telling you where to look. It can feel almost too quiet at first, like you’re missing something. And then it clicks. The color starts to spread out in your mind the same way it does across the canvas, and you realize how intentional it is. Frankenthaler had this way of making paintings that feel completely unforced but are actually the result of very specific, very confident decisions. In a moment when so many artists were trying to be bigger, louder, and more intense, she went in a different direction and somehow changed painting just as much, if not more.

She wasn’t just part of the postwar New York art scene, she helped shift its entire direction in a way that still feels fresh. Born in 1928 into a well-off Manhattan family, she had early exposure to culture and art, but nothing about her work feels overly polished or distant. If anything, it feels intuitive, like she trusted her instincts more than any formal rulebook.

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Her breakthrough moment came in 1952 with Mountains and Sea, a painting that honestly feels like a turning point not just for her, but for modern painting in general. Inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, she created this loose, atmospheric composition by pouring heavily diluted oil paint directly onto unprimed canvas. Instead of paint sitting on the surface, it soaked in, creating these soft, blooming washes of color that feel almost like stained fabric or watercolor. This soak-stain technique became her signature, and it directly influenced artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who took her idea and pushed it into what we now call Color Field painting.

But she got there first, and she did it in a way that felt personal rather than theoretical.

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What’s interesting is that Frankenthaler was moving within a very intense, very male-dominated circle of artists at the time. Think Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline. These were huge personalities making bold, aggressive work, and she was right there among them, not mimicking their energy but offering something completely different. Her paintings weren’t about force, they were about flow. They didn’t demand attention, they drew you in. There’s a kind of confidence in that restraint that feels very modern, even now.

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Her relationship with Robert Motherwell is also such a key part of her story, both personally and artistically. They met in the early 1950s and married in 1958, becoming one of the art world’s most talked-about couples. Motherwell was already an established figure in Abstract Expressionism, intellectual and deeply rooted in theory, while Frankenthaler had this more instinctive, experimental approach.

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i took the train to yale for a day filled with art

and it turned into something way better than I expected.

A few Saturday moons ago I took the train to New Haven with the sole intention of looking at art all day. I had no real plan beyond that, just a 10am Grand Central appointment and a large coffee, and a full day blocked off to move through studios and museums at my own pace. It felt very specific and a little indulgent (?) in the best way. Transparently, March was a big month for me in terms of my career. It was a lot of travel, a lot of meetings, a lot of moving at a pace that felt exciting but also a little relentless. I wouldn’t call it burnout, but I could feel the need for a reset. Not rest exactly, but something more intentional. A day that felt immersive and creatively grounding.

The train ride itself was quiet, which I liked, but it also felt very intentional. I wasn’t just going to see art, I was going somewhere specifically for it, and that changes everything. When you decide a place is the destination, not just something you pass through, it forces you to show up differently. You’re more open. It feels less like consumption and more like actually experiencing something.

I think that’s why days like this matter so much to me. Working in the art world means I’m constantly looking, constantly thinking, constantly assessing. It’s exciting, but it can also flatten things if you’re not careful. You start to see work through a very specific lens. What it means, where it sits, what it could become. And then there’s the other side of it, which is quieter and honestly more important. The part where you let yourself just like things again. Where you don’t need to justify your reaction or turn it into anything productive. You’re just there, taking it in, letting it affect you.

I really needed that.

So the train, the walk through New Haven, arriving on campus, it all felt like a shift into that space. Slower, more focused, a little more personal. No pressure to be anywhere else and no reason to rush. Just a full day to look at art in a way that actually fills you back up. I went straight to the Yale School of Art MFA Open Studios and let the day unfold from there.

And somehow, it ended up being one of the most creatively energizing days I’ve had in a long time.

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the yale MFA open studios

aka walking into 50 different brains at once.

If you’ve never been to an MFA open studio day, it’s honestly one of the most intimate ways to experience art. You’re not seeing work in its final, perfectly lit, gallery-approved state, you’re seeing it mid-thought/mid-question/mid-identity crisis, even. For Yale MFA students, that energy is amplified. Their MFA program is famously intense, critique-driven, and borderline mythologized in the art world. It’s not just about making good art, it’s about completely rethinking how and why you make anything at all. You could feel that in every studio.

Some spaces were chaotic in the best way; paintings stacked, materials everywhere, ideas clearly still developing. This type of studio is my favorite, I love looking at the artists process and seeing what inspires them to create. Others were so controlled they felt like conceptual installations in themselves. Every studio was different, but what tied it all together was this shared seriousness, and no one was playing it safe (thank God).

This MFA open studio setting is contemporary art in bloom.

faye wei wei IRL (i was not normal about this)

like… at all

The main event of the day, easily, was seeing Faye Wei Wei’s studio. I had every intention of being normal about it and immediately failed. Her work already carries this kind of quiet authority online and in exhibitions, but in person it shifts completely. The paintings have a presence that is hard to explain without sounding dramatic. They’re soft but exacting, emotional without ever tipping into excess, almost cinematic in the way they hold a moment.

And then there’s the studio itself, which honestly felt like an extension of the work. Not in a staged way, just naturally, intuitively hers. There were small sketchbooks scattered around, the kind you want to pick up and spend hours with, shelves lined with romantic literature, antique bookcases, sheet music, everything layered in a way that felt lived-in but deeply considered. And the couch, this perfect washed pink, very Hotel Chelsea, very Patti Smith era energy.

more pics from inside Faye Wei Wei's studio <3

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There’s something very specific happening in her work: these figures, these atmospheres, this slightly surreal narrative space that feels both personal and art historically aware. You can sense influences, but nothing feels borrowed. It’s all been absorbed and rearticulated into something that is entirely her own. And standing there, in her studio, seeing the scale, the brushwork, the way the pieces exist together—it just clicked. This is an artist who is going to be huge. I’m calling it now. She’s already on that trajectory, with growing recognition and a presence that extends well beyond “emerging artist,” but being there felt like catching a moment before it fully explodes. Which is such a rare, special thing.

Also, just as a person, her work reads as deeply thoughtful and self-possessed. There’s a clarity of vision that you can’t fake. She is beautiful. She is kind. She has an aura that I can’t even articulate. One thing is for certain, Faye is already an icon.

I was, in every sense, starstruck.

the yale university art gallery

why is no one talking about how good this is ???

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After the studios, I went to the Yale University Art Gallery, and I need to talk about this because… why is no one talking about how good this is? It’s the oldest university art museum in the U.S. (founded in 1832, casual), and somehow it still feels underrated. The collection is genuinely kind of insane—like, casually on par with major museums.

You move through all the centuries without it feeling forced. Old Masters, Impressionism, modern, and contemporary, it all flows in a way that makes sense without over-explaining itself. My personal favorite part: it’s calm. Minimal crowds, no chaos, no feeling like you have to rush past a painting because there are 374,947 people behind you. I could actually stand in front of works and just sit with them…the best feeling in the world.

The Impressionist rooms felt light and dreamy, the modern collection held its own (truly), and the contemporary works didn’t feel like an afterthought. Honorable mention to the two Florine Stettheimer paintings I saw that I may or may not have fan-girled at for like 10 minutes. Also, very Yale-coded in the best way: the collection has been shaped by scholars and curators who clearly care about intellectual context as much as visual impact. It’s not random. There’s a distinct point of view.

the outro.

why this day is staying with me

On the train ride back, everything felt differently chemically. I got the proper reset that I needed. As I was on the train I started to wonder… ;)

…about the contrast of the day: starting in the raw, unfinished energy of the MFA studios, where everything is still being questioned and built, and ending in the museum, where works have already been absorbed into history. Process and permanence being reflected side by side. I feel seriously grounded by that. About seeing artists in the middle of figuring things out, and then walking into a space where art is preserved, contextualized, and given weight. It made the whole experience feel complete, like I had moved through the full lifecycle of art in a single day.

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On the train ride back, I felt that very specific kind of satisfied that only comes from a day that just hit different. It wasn’t overly productive, not chaotic, just exactly what it needed to be. I kept replaying everything a little bit, the studios, the museum, the feeling of having nowhere else to be. And also, not to be sentimental, but I did have a moment where I was like 12-year-old me, who used to wear a Yale sweatshirt over her school uniform like it was part of her personality, would be very into this. Not even in a serious way, just the idea of taking the train to Connecticut for the day to romanticize looking at art and walking around campus like it’s my own little world. Young Tahlia would have thought that was so chic.

Which, honestly, it kind of is.

Anyway. Highly recommend assigning yourself a side quest every once in a while (more specifically to Yale University for an art centered factory reset). More of that energy going forward.

With love,

The Art Girl

There’s something deeply romantic about the idea of artists paying for their stay not with money, but with their work. Not in a calculated, self-aware way, but in the kind of quiet, human exchange that feels impossible now. No invoices, no contracts, no sense that this would one day be worth millions. Just a painting offered in place of a bill, and a hotel owner who understood that value doesn’t always look like cash. Tucked into the hills of Saint-Paul-de-Vence in Provence, La Colombe d’Or still carries that feeling. You arrive expecting charm and leave realizing you’ve brushed up against something much rarer, a place where the art world, before it became an industry, is still intact.

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The story begins in the 1920s with Paul Roux and his wife Baptistine, who opened what was then a simple inn. The Colombe d’Or started life in 1920 as “Chez Robinson”, a café bar with an open air-terrace where people would dance at weekends. It’s important to note that it was not designed to become legendary. It was built to welcome people, and Roux had a particular instinct for recognizing artists not as outsiders, but as his kind of crowd. As more painters and writers drifted through the South of France, drawn by light, landscape, and the promise of a slower life, the inn became a natural meeting point. What makes this story so compelling is that many of the artists we now think of as untouchable icons were, at the time, just trying to keep going. Money was inconsistent. Recognition was not guaranteed. Roux let them stay anyway. Meals were shared, drinks were poured, and when it came time to settle up, paintings appeared (my actual dream I think)?

The list of those paintings reads almost unreal now. Pablo Picasso spent time at the hotel and left behind ceramics and works that still feel alive within the space. Henri Matisse, whose entire visual language feels inseparable from the Mediterranean, contributed pieces that seem to echo the colors just outside the windows. Marc Chagall, who eventually made Saint-Paul-de-Vence his home, brought that floating, dreamlike quality that turns everyday scenes into something emotional and surreal. Fernand Léger’s work adds a completely different energy, bold and structured, almost industrial, sitting in contrast with the softness of the Provençal setting. Georges Braque, one of the key figures behind Cubism, passed through as well, as did Joan Miró, whose playful forms feel surprisingly at ease in a place that never tried too hard to impress. Even Alexander Calder left one of his mobiles, which moves gently in the air, a perfect match for a hotel defined by openness and light.

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What’s striking is not just who left work there, but how that work is treated, nothing is overly staged and nothing feels locked away. The art isn’t presented as something separate from life, it’s embedded within it. You might have lunch next to a painting that would be untouchable in any other context. You might pass a sculpture on your way to dinner without even realizing its significance until later. That lack of ceremony is what makes the place feel so modern, even now. It quietly rejects the idea that art needs to be isolated to be important. Instead, it suggests the opposite, that art is at its best when it lives alongside us, when it absorbs conversation, movement, and time.

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There’s also something about this story that feels especially relevant right now. The “girl art world” conversation has been circling around access, intimacy, and the desire to move away from cold, transactional spaces. La Colombe d’Or feels like an early version of that shift. It was never about exclusivity in the way we think of it today. It was about proximity, about being in the room, about relationships that blurred the line between personal and professional. These artists weren’t building brands, they were building lives, and this hotel held space for that in a way that feels almost radical in hindsight.

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The good news is, La Colombe D’Or still resonates. This isn’t because of the names on the walls, but because of what those names represent before they became fixed in history. At La Colombe d’Or, they are still in motion. They’re still arriving, still staying a little longer than planned, still leaving something behind. And the idea that something as simple as generosity could shape a collection this extraordinary feels like a reminder of a different kind of art world. One that was slower, more instinctive, and more human.

With love,

The Art Girl

what you’re really buying when you buy art.

If you’re reading this, you’re already in it. Your relationship to art has shifted quietly, but completely. You’re not just walking into a gallery, noticing what you like, and moving on anymore. You’re lingering longer, you’re asking better questions, you’re noticing when answers feel slightly vague, or when availability feels selective in a way that’s hard to explain. You’re picking up on patterns, even if you can’t fully articulate them yet. That’s the shift: From looking to collecting and observing to participating. And once you’re here, the most important thing to understand is this:

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The art world does a really good job of selling fantasy and part of what makes it so compelling is that it does feel beautiful. Openings, dinner parties, perfectly lit rooms, people who look like they have nothing to worry about (because a lot of them don’t), and yes, that exists. I’m in those rooms all the time.

In 2025, according to annual reports from UBS and Art Basel , the global art market moved about $59.6 billion in sales. That number alone reveals that this is a serious financial ecosystem. Blue-chip works regularly trade through places like Sotheby’s and Christie’s for eight and nine figures. Although prices at the emerging level can feel arbitrary, the numbers aren’t random. Rather, they’re composed of non-obvious factors that are disconnected from most buyers. That disconnect is the whole point, because value in art doesn’t appear fully formed, it builds. True collecting requires patience that runs contrary to buzzy headlines about fast-paced auctions and sold-out booths at Basel, and produces a self-selected group of so-called “serious buyers”. The value of an artwork is shaped over time through gallery support, collector interest, institutional attention, cultural relevance, social media, and so much more. It’s a process that unfolds gradually, even if from the outside it sometimes looks sudden. What you’re sensing, that slight disconnect between what something is and what it costs… is actually where the market is doing its work.

Once you begin to see that, you stop reacting at the surface level. You start paying attention to what’s underneath and which cues matter to you in your decision to buy or hold. Despite my above spiel about patience, studying the forces that move the art market will also help you know when you need to move quickly.

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Now—let’s ground all this in real examples and organize the typical patterns we see in contemporary art sales.

1. a rising tide lifts all boats

This trend is when all relevant conditions become favorable simultaneously to the benefit of all parties. Take Amoako Boafo for example. In 2018, his paintings were selling for under $10,000. By 2020, one of his works sold at Phillips for over $1 million. This kind of jump doesn’t happen randomly. It came off the back of gallery support, institutional attention, and a very fast surge in collector demand that was, to be honest, partially manufactured and partially organic… which is usually how it goes. Everything harmonizes, and everyone benefits.

2. controlled chaos

Next, let’s look at Avery Singer. Early works were accessible to collectors paying attention. Her initial market was tightly controlled and you had to be in the know. Then came major institutional backing, inclusion in significant museum shows, and suddenly you’re seeing her market solidify at a completely different level. It was by no means overnight, but faster than most people, and especially new buyers, were ready for.

3. countercultural scarcity

And then there’s Banksy, which is a slightly different case but incredibly important and accounts for market trends across a large swath of art that aestheticizes political and social commentary. His market shows how narrative drives value. Banksy has cultural relevance, anonymity, and spectacle. His auction results don’t just reflect the work, they reflect the story and tax bracket-association people are buying into. There’s a certain level of irony informing the value of these multimillion dollar paintings that can only be bought by those who run the systems these paintings critique. Artists like Banksy have, in a sense, created insulated markets for their works as an additional spectacle.

These are excellent examples of success stories. But for every one of these, there are dozens of artists whose markets spike and then flatten, especially now. I call this The Miami Effect.

The Miami Effect

In 2021 and 2022, there was a massive influx of new buyers in the market. Post-pandemic liquidity, crypto money, day-trading bros, NFTs, a lot of younger collectors entering fast. Contemporary art sales at auction surged. First-time Basel attendees who were also first-time buyers hit an all-time high. Then in 2023, the market corrected. Auction totals dropped by around 14% overall, with the biggest softness at the ultra-contemporary level, meaning artists under 45 who had been flipped quickly started to stall out.

These are the cycles. Hype, acceleration, correction, and, if the artist actually has depth, quiet stabilization or an insular market. Most buyers enter during the hype stage. The goal of this newsletter is to prepare collectors and investors before the spike…or the surge.

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So, with emerging buyers being almost entirely excluded from the above…

why begin investing in art at all?

The answer is simple. When investing in art is done right, it gives you something almost no other asset can offer in the same way. Art simultaneously holds financial and cultural value, which typically don’t move together, and that’s exactly what makes it interesting. You’re not just placing your capital into an object. You’re placing it into an idea, a person, a moment in time that either expands or disappears depending on how that artist’s career unfolds and how societal values shift over time. That might sound abstract, but the supporting data is very real.

The global art market has hovered between $60–70 billion annually in sales over the last decade, even through periods of economic instability. In 2023 alone it reached roughly $65 billion. That kind of consistency is part of why firms like Knight Frank track art alongside real estate, watches, and classic cars as a legitimate store of wealth for high-net-worth individuals.

At the top end of the market, works by artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, and Yayoi Kusama have shown long-term price appreciation that rivals traditional blue-chip assets. We’re talking about paintings that were acquired decades ago for under $100,000 now trading in the tens of millions through houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. But that’s the top of the pyramid, and it’s important to understand how steep that pyramid actually is.

Because here’s the part that people don’t always say out loud…

An uncomfortable, but shrewd way to understand the current art market is that it in many ways mirrors our broader economic system. Most of the opportunity hovers at the very top and very bottom of the pyramid, with the middle ground almost entirely gone. The good news is that for emerging collectors with tight budgets, there is considerable upside to getting in with a promising artist early.

A small percentage of artists account for the majority of the market’s value. Some estimates suggest the top 1% of artists make up over 50% of total global sales at auction. Which means if you’re entering the market without context, without guidance, without really understanding what drives value, you are far more likely to buy something that simply doesn’t move. Not because it isn’t good, not because it isn’t beautiful, but because the market didn’t form around it in a meaningful way. It is important to understand that that’s not failure, it’s structure.

I see this play out constantly, and it usually starts the same way. Someone buys something because it feels right at the moment and checks a couple, emotion-driven boxes. They connect with it, which matters. Or they’re told there’s strong demand, which might also be true, but the genesis of the demand matters too. Sometimes there are “multiple collectors circling”… sometimes there aren’t… it depends. They spend $20,000, $30,000, $50,000. For a while, it feels great and it should. Living with art is one of the best parts of all of this. It makes you feel cool. But then, a year or two passes, and the question shifts from “Do I love this?” to “What is this actually doing?” This is where things get more nuanced, because resale in the art world is not guaranteed, and it’s not immediate. It depends on whether that artist’s market continues to develop and whether galleries keep supporting them. Also, whether or not institutions showed them, whether collectors are still actively trying to acquire their work.

If those things align, the value builds. If they don’t, it can stay exactly where it is for a very long time. Sometimes longer than people expect. Regardless, the best way to buy a market-proof piece of art, is to buy something you truly love.

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A big part of this comes down to understanding how different parts of the market function, because they are not all doing the same thing at the same time. Primary market galleries, the ones representing artists directly, are building careers very intentionally. Spaces like Gagosian and David Zwirner are not just selling objects, they are shaping long-term markets. They place works carefully, often prioritizing collectors who will hold onto them, lend them to exhibitions, and contribute to the artist’s visibility over time (THIS IS THE 1%, TRACKING THIS IS SO IMPORTANT)! That kind of placement matters more than people realize.

Then you have the secondary market, auction houses like Phillips alongside Sotheby’s and Christie’s. This is where things become public and where demand is tested in real time, in front of the entire market. And these results don’t get to stay quiet. When a work exceeds its estimate, it reinforces confidence. When it underperforms, that signal travels just as quickly, even if it’s not being openly discussed at dinner.

That dynamic between private placement and public validation is constantly shaping value behind the scenes.

so when you’re buying art… what are you actually buying?

Simply put, you’re buying into an artist’s trajectory. Not just where they are, but where they’re going, and whether the right people are invested in getting them there. You’re buying into a network: Galleries, curators, collectors, institutions– All of these play a role in whether that trajectory holds and they’re all equally as important. You’re buying timing, which is honestly one of the most overlooked parts of this.

Enter too early without support and nothing happens. Enter too late and the upside is already gone.

You’re also buying your own position within that ecosystem, because collecting isn’t passive. Over time, it places you in rooms, in conversations, in proximity to people who are shaping culture in real time. This part compounds in a way that’s hard to quantify… but it’s very real.

This is also where my role becomes very clear.

why hire an advisor?

The art market is not designed to be easily navigated from the outside. Information is fragmented and access is relationship-based. Pricing is nuanced and constantly shifting depending on context. An advisor sits in the middle of alllllll of that. Not necessarily just sourcing artwork, but interpreting the market in real time.

What that actually looks like is layered. It’s knowing which artists are being seriously supported behind the scenes. It’s understanding how pricing is evolving across both galleries and auctions. It’s recognizing when demand is genuine and when it’s moving too quickly without enough foundation underneath it. It’s also access— which is something people don’t fully understand until they experience the difference.

Many of the strongest opportunities in this market never make it to the walls of a gallery and definitely aren’t online to be discovered. They’re shared one-on-one in archive rooms and private links, enabled by relationships that have been built over years. If a gallery doesn’t know who you are, you’re usually not seeing the best work. Not because they’re excluding you, but because they’re protecting the artist’s market. What I’m doing every day is building relationships with gallery owners and meeting artists directly to collect real-time data. Who’s exhibiting where, which artists are being acquired by institutions, how pricing is shifting across both gallery and auction contexts, where demand is building, and where it’s starting to feel overheated. And sometimes the most valuable thing I can say is… wait. Or no. I say no a lot. Not necessarily because something isn’t good, but because the timing doesn’t make sense yet or the pricing has moved too quickly without enough support underneath it. That kind of restraint is what allows collections to actually grow in a meaningful way over time. That kind of decision-making is what separates collecting from simply acquiring.

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If there’s one thing I want you to hold onto, it’s this—

If you’re in this, you are playing the long game. It’s slower than people expect, with generational and institutional layers. It’s occasionally frustrating in a way that forces you to become more thoughtful and more precise. The partial aim of this newsletter is to share as I learn new information amidst a constantly-evolving market. Once you understand the dynamics and start seeing the patterns, the relationships, and signals that most people miss, buying art becomes something entirely different. It isn’t just an asset, it’s not just something beautiful to live with. A collection is something you build intentionally, over time. A collection reflects your taste, your perspective, and the decisions you made before those artists became obvious to everyone else. You stop reacting and you start anticipating.

This is where the real value is.

So yeah, this is what I’m going to keep breaking down here. The data, the shifts, the opportunities, how to lead with your eyes, and also the moments where things don’t quite add up, because those are just as important.

There’s a difference between participating in the art world and actually understanding how to move within it.

Welcome to the investment side of The Art Girl.

Xx

There’s something cinematic about stumbling across a Danielle Mckinney painting for the first time. It feels like you’ve walked into a moment you weren’t supposed to see—but instead of turning away, you stay, you look longer. And somehow, the longer you look, the louder the silence gets.

Danielle Mckinney is a painter based in New Jersey, and if you don’t know her yet, welcome to it. Her work has been steadily (and kind of quietly) taking over the contemporary art world, landing in big galleries and collections—but what makes her stand out isn’t just where her art hangs, it’s how it feels.

Before fully stepping into painting, Mckinney actually started out as a photographer. And honestly, you can tell. Her paintings carry that same sense of framing and intimacy, like someone paused a film right in the middle of a deeply personal scene. Her subjects are often women, alone, existing in these dimly lit interiors. They’re smoking, lounging, thinking, resting. Nothing dramatic is happening. And yet… everything is happening?

That’s what makes her work so special.

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After a bleak, bone-chilling February, New York finally exhales. The snow has melted into memory, replaced by that first fragile hint of spring—the kind that feels more like a promise than a season. And right on cue, the city’s art world is waking up.

March’s exhibitions feel like early blossoms: soft, deliberate, and quietly radiant. Across Manhattan, galleries and museums are leaning into both reverence and renewal—pairing sweeping retrospectives of canonical figures with intimate, deeply personal contemporary voices. It’s a month that moves between past and present with ease, offering everything from iconic legacies to cult favorites worth returning to again and again.

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1. Keith Haring, The Brant Foundation

March 11 – May 31

The Brant Foundation’s East Village space continues its streak of honoring the artists who defined downtown New York in the 1980s—and this time, it’s Keith Haring.

Focusing on the years 1980 to 1983, the exhibition captures Haring at his most urgent and formative. There’s something especially poetic about seeing these works just blocks from where he first made his mark in subway stations and on city streets. Before even stepping inside, the neighborhood sets the tone—you can almost feel the residue of that era’s raw creative energy.

Inside, the work pulses with immediacy: bold lines, rhythmic repetition, and a visual language that feels just as alive today. Haring’s art wasn’t just aesthetic—it was activist, accessible, and inseparable from the city itself. This show doesn’t just present his work; it places you back in the moment it was born.

2. The Adventure of Domenico Gnoli, Lévy Gorvy Dayan

March 18 – May 23

After a week in Los Angeles full of sunshine and the vibrancy of LA Art Week, the temptation to switch coasts has been real. But just when I think it might be time for a new chapter in a different city, Lévy Gorvy Dayan tethers me back east and reminds me why it’ll always be New York or nowhere. This major presentation of one of my favorite painters in my favorite gallery is certain to be a highlight of the season.

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Domenico Gnoli’s work exists in a strange, beautiful tension—hyper-focused yet expansive, quiet yet monumental. His subjects are deceptively simple: a section of hair, the fold of a collar, fabric stretched across a body. But through his lens, these fragments become entire worlds. There’s something hypnotic about the way he crops and isolates—turning the mundane into something almost sacred. The stillness in his paintings feels deliberate, heavy in the best way. Light doesn’t just illuminate; it lingers. Gnoli’s body of work is relatively small, which only adds to its mystique. In a city that often celebrates scale and spectacle, this exhibition feels like an invitation to slow down—to look closer, and then closer still. It’s the kind of show you don’t just visit once.

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They say that life imitates art… but what about when film imitates art?

I’ve always been a big movie buff. Some of my favorite memories growing up involve sitting down with my family on a Friday nights ordering Pay-Per-View movies and eating copious amounts of popcorn. Movies were never just background noise in our house—they were something to talk about, rewatch, and obsess over. Over time, I like to think I’ve become pretty literate in the language of cinema: the way a camera moves, how a frame is composed, and the subtle visual choices directors make to tell a story.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started noticing something that fascinates me even more. Every so often, a frame in a film will feel strangely familiar…like I’ve seen it somewhere before. And then it clicks: it’s a painting. Directors have been quietly borrowing from art history for decades, recreating compositions, moods, and symbolism from works by artists like René Magritte, Vincent van Gogh, and Edward Hopper.Most viewers might never notice these references, but once you do, they’re impossible to unsee. A single frame suddenly carries centuries of artistic meaning.

Here are some of my favorite moments when cinema and painting quietly collide. Film has often borrowed from painting—not merely for beauty, but for meaning. Directors have looked to art (usually painting) to communicate emotion and psychological depth in a single frame. Sometimes the reference is obvious, sometimes subliminal, but once you see it, you can never unsee it. The list of references is quite endless if you begin to look closely. These are several of my favorite instances. May they inspire you to rewatch and understand the choices made by these talented visionaries.

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1. Moonrise Kingdom (2012), directed by Wes Anderson

Reference to: Alex Colville, To Prince Edward Island, 1965

Wes Anderson’s films often feel painted, and that is no accident. The director borrows a woman holding up binoculars to her face from Alex Colville’s composition, creating a scene with devastating precision. Like Colville, Anderson uses flatness and precision to create an uneasy beauty. Moonrise Kingdom unfolds like an illustrated novel that has been carefully composed, full of figures that feel posed as if time itself has paused.

2. Dreams (1990), directed by Akira Kurosawa

Reference to: Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield With Crows, 1890

Cinema becomes meditation in Dreams, and nowhere is that clearer than in its homage to Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows. An actor (a 47-year-old Martin Scorsese) wanders throughout the landscape in a portrayal of Van Gogh himself. Set to Chopin, the scene transforms the artist’s torment into cinematic language. The menacing sky, the crows, and the dead-end path reference the impossibility of resolution and the end of life approaching.

3. The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin

Reference to: René Magritte, The Empire of Light series, c. 1939–1967

Few cinematic images are as iconic as Father Merrin standing beneath a street lamp in The Exorcist. The scene mirrors René Magritte’s The Empire of Light series, where night and day coexist. Director William Friedkin aimed to replicate the paradoxical atmosphere of the painting to evoke a sense of quiet terror. The lamp post and streaming light from the bedroom window of the home become a fragile symbol of good, standing against overwhelming evil. The single surrealist image transforms the film into an embodiment of fear and faith in tension.

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4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), directed by Chris Columbus / Inception (2010), directed by Christopher Nolan

Reference to: M.C. Escher, Ascending and Descending, 1960

The impossible staircase, Escher’s paradoxical image, is found across cinema in logic-defying worlds. Hogwarts’ shifting staircases are Escher’s lithograph in a magical universe: disorienting and infinite. Percy Weasley warns the young wizards and witches upon their arrival at the castle: “Keep an eye on the staircases. They like to change.” Inception also borrows this visual language with its Penrose stairs. In this iteration, space becomes unreliable, and movement loses meaning in a sealed architectural feature.

Escher’s letter to his son Arthur from January 1960 talks about the process of creating the lithograph:

5. Melancholia, directed by Lars Von Trier

Reference to: John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–52

A bride played by Kirsten Dunst lies afloat in a body of water in the opening scene of Melancholia, mirroring Millais’ tragic depiction of Ophelia. Set to a composition by Richard Wagner, the figure surrenders to the inevitability of her demise at the end of the world. Here, the image becomes both homage and prophecy. Millais’ Ophelia sings as she drowns while von Trier’s Justine accepts cosmic annihilation with a haunting calm.

6. Frozen (2013), Walt Disney Pictures

Reference to: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767

Fragonard’s composition is Rococo indulgence reflected in a single image. Lush foliage surrounds a moment of flirtation interrupted. The painting’s energy lies in its sense of pleasure and possibility. That same spirit appears in Disney’s Frozen during Anna’s musical number “For the First Time in Forever.” As Anna dances through the palace, she jumps into position in the same place as the female figure on the swing. The visual composition of the shot (and this portion of the film) echoes Fragonard’s painting: soft skirts, airborne motion, and a woman intoxicated by the feeling of freedom.

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There are certain weeks in Los Angeles when the city feels like it’s vibrating a little louder than usual, and Frieze week is one of them. This year’s Frieze Los Angeles felt especially charged. The air was warm, the palm trees were swaying, and everywhere you turned there were collectors, artists, curators, and friends running into each other with that slightly breathless look that says, “Have you seen it yet?”

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What struck me most was the sense of momentum this year. Galleries showed up with conviction. Museums were present and engaged. Brands weren’t just sponsoring— they were participating. It felt cohesive and confident, like the ecosystem was working together rather than competing for noise. It felt really, really good.

The week began, as many good art weeks do, with a blur of events. Cultured Magazine hosted a chic gathering with Toteme that felt polished but still warm, a perfect example of how fashion and art continue to intersect in meaningful ways.

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Across town, Regen Projects mounted a solo exhibition of Wolfgang Tillmans that reminded everyone why he remains so influential. The show was thoughtful and precise, layered with images that felt both political and deeply personal at the same time. If you haven’t been to Regen Project's space in LA, I HIGHLY suggest you pay a visit soon.

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At Half Gallery, Leonard Baby presented an evocative body of work that drew people in quietly. It had that emotional undertone that lingers long after you leave the room.

Inside the Frieze fair itself, there were several moments that stopped me in my tracks. At Gladstone Gallery, the 2026 paintings by Alex Katz felt like a meditation on clarity. His compositions are so crisp and assured, the kind of work that does not need to shout to command attention. And I mean it's a 2026 Alex Katz… The man is 98 years old. So impressive and inspiring that he’s still creating. (sighs in adoration)

Over at David Kordansky Gallery, Vigil by Tristan Unrau had a magnetic stillness about it. People lingered in front of it. Conversations softened. It was one of those pieces that creates its own atmosphere. Sold on opening day, of course.

At Hauser & Wirth, Conny Maier’s paintings were energetic and layered, full of movement and texture that rewarded close looking. Her inaugural show with Hauser and Wirth, everyone there was a big big fan. (I may or may not have planned my outfit around seeing her work ;).

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And in Beverly Hills, Gagosian presented a stunning exhibition of Sara Sze. Her work felt expansive yet intimate, intricate constructions that seemed to hover between chaos and control.

Downtown, ’s opening night was one of the liveliest gatherings of the week. The room was packed, the energy high, and the focus squarely on emerging voices. Danielle Kosann’s work stood out to me for its thoughtful sensibility and magical whimsy feeling

Meanwhile, Jack Penny’s presentation was completely mobbed the entire evening (no shocker there). It was nearly impossible to get close, which is often the clearest sign that something meaningful is happening (because it is).

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And of course, I have to mention Felix Art Fair at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. Felix has a way of feeling intimate and serious at the same time. The rooms encourage slower looking, deeper conversation, and this year the quality across the board felt strong. the Roosevelt Hollywood Hotel was an excellent backdrop, I literally felt like I was in an episode of Entourage the entire time. It was sick.

Personally, the week was full but strangely grounding at the same time. I moved from fair to dinner to opening and back again, yet I felt completely calm and at peace the entire time. Being surrounded by art, by conversation, by people who genuinely care about culture has a way of lowering the noise in my own head. Sure, my days were long… but they were filled with moments of stillness in front of paintings and sculptures that reminded me why I do this. Why I want to do everything I can to rewrite the narrative here. By the time I boarded my flight home (which is happening as I type this), I was tired but creatively restored. I truly felt devastated to leave, not out of exhaustion, but because I wanted more time inside that rhythm. I have more inspired and motivated than ever right now, and I owe all that to you, Los Angeles.

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Frieze week in Los Angeles showed me a market that feels steady and a community that feels optimistic. As The Art Girl in LA, I left with pages of notes, a camera roll full of artworks I cannot stop thinking about, and a renewed belief that we are entering a strong chapter for contemporary art. If this is the tone for the year ahead, it is going to be a good one. And I cannot wait to keep sharing it with you.

With love,

The Art Girl

There is truly nothing like Los Angeles art week. It’s part art fair, part social experiment, part fashion show, and part excuse to completely abandon your NYC winter identity. The art girl in Los Angeles is a very specific creature. She’s relaxed but calculated. Effortless but also clearly spent an hour deciding what felt effortless. Everything is a little lighter in LA. Lighter fabrics, lighter moods, lighter conversations. People smile more. People linger. People wear things that would feel absurd anywhere else and somehow look perfect.

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I am writing this as it is currently blizzarding in New York City. Truly blizzarding. Everyone please pray I am able to make my flight to LA Wednesday so I can escape this and remember who I am when I am not wearing UNIQLO heat tech and survival gear. Frieze always comes at the exact right time, because I am truly FRIEZEing right now (someone stop me). It comes when you need warmth, stimulation, and the reminder that being an art patron is actually very fun.

Packing for Frieze is its own ritual. Let's see what I’m packing this year:

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2. Alicja Kwade, Mono Monde, 2026

   Presented by 303 Gallery

3. Yoshitomo Nara, Knife, 2022

   Presented by Pace Prints

4. Conny Maier, California Dreaming, 2025

   Presented by Hauser and Wirth

5. James Turrell, Suite From Aten Reign, 2014

   Presented by Pace Prints

6. Danielle Kosann, The Ecstasy Of Life, 2026

   Presented by Lobster Club

These are the artworks I’m hyper-fixating on for LA Art Week this year. If you want to see more behind the scenes and insight from my travels, make sure to subscribe here and follow my other channels (in my bio) also!

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With love,

The Art Girl

There’s a particular kind of painting that makes you want to text your friends, buy flowers, and reread your favorite poems again. Faye Wei Wei makes exactly that kind of art. Her canvases exist somewhere between myth and memory, populated by lovers, friends, animals, saints, and symbols that feel ancient, yet deeply personal.

Born in London in 1994, Wei Wei emerged as one of the most closely watched figurative painters of her generation after graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. Since then, her work has traveled internationally, appearing in exhibitions across Europe, the U.S., and Asia, and gaining attention for its distinctive emotional and symbolic language. The artist is currently working toward her MFA at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and is set to graduate this year! Yay!

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Born in New York in 1942, Bradford has built a decades-long career by painting luminous and emotionally charged scenes that hover between abstraction and narration. Her canvases are populated by swimmers, flying figures, boats, and human bodies suspended in vast fields of color. She references outer space, Superman, and the world at midnight in her oeuvre of paintings.

Bradford paints feeling rather than narrative. She often begins without a fixed plan, letting forms emerge intuitively. She lets things work naturally on the canvas rather than forcing a predetermined image. The result is works that feel poetic, open-ended, and deeply psychological.

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Her figures are hardly ever grounded to one plane. They float, drift, fall, or fly. They exist in states of transition that reflect various emotional experiences, usually hope, isolation, vulnerability, or community.

There’s also something radical in her softness. Bradford’s swimmers and caped figures act as stand-ins for transformations. Bodies become something else, create shapes, or exist outside traditional definitions of gendered identity.

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Before Elsa Peretti ever redesigned the language of jewelry, she was already living like a woman who understood form, appetite, and spectacle. Born in Florence in 1940 to a wealthy industrial family, Peretti rejected the polite expectations placed on her early. She moved to Barcelona in the 1960s and later to New York, where she modeled, danced, and immersed herself in a downtown world that blurred art, fashion, and nightlife into one seductive blur. Studio 54 became her unofficial salon. Halston became her creative soulmate. What set Peretti apart even then was her instinct for shape. She did not simply wear clothes or jewels… She animated them.

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Her entry into jewelry was almost accidental and therefore perfect. Designing pieces for Halston’s runway shows in the early 1970s, Peretti introduced a sensibility that felt radically intimate. Her work drew from the human body, from bones and curves, from objects found in nature and everyday life. In 1974, she joined Tiffany & Co., a partnership that would quietly revolutionize the brand and the industry itself. Silver was no longer secondary or casual. It became erotic, sculptural, and essential. The Bone Cuff, the Open Heart, Diamonds by the Yard. These were not accessories but declarations. Jewelry that moved with you. Jewelry that assumed you had somewhere important to be.

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If the art market had a mood board right now, it would be equal parts cautious optimism, quiet confidence, and a very expensive glass of champagne. We’re only a few weeks into 2026, and while everyone is still whispering about inflation, interest rates, and “market softness,” the Old Masters just reminded us that some things never go out of style… especially when they’re really, really good. This week at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, collectors showed up, paddles were raised, and three lots in particular made it very clear that historical masterpieces still have serious pull. So grab your metaphorical auction paddle — let’s talk about what sold, for how much, and what it all says about where the market is headed.

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Masters Week in New York was a blockbuster. From a lounging lion by Rembrandt to a unicorn tapestry that could make a medieval influencer weep, the top lots were as dramatic as they were brilliant.

Let’s dive into the three headliners that had collectors reaching for their paddles—and their wallets:

1. Rembrandt’s “Young Lion Resting” – $17.9 million

First up, the king of chiaroscuro himself: Rembrandt van Rijn. His intimate drawing, “Young Lion Resting,” roared to a record-breaking $17.9 million at Sotheby’s “Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries” sale. This isn’t just any sketch—it’s the only known Rembrandt lion drawing still in private hands, and it hadn’t been on the market in over a century. The best part? The proceeds are going to Panthera, a global wild cat conservation group. So, this little lion is now funding big-cat protection worldwide. Talk about a philanthropic purr-chase (I hated that).

2. Michelangelo’s Study of the Libyan Sibyl – $27.2 million

Over at Christie’s, the Renaissance flexed its muscles. A double-sided drawing by Michelangelo, featuring studies for the Libyan Sibyl’s foot and leg (yes, just the foot and leg), strutted its way to a staggering $27.2 million. Originally estimated at a modest $1.5 million, this anatomical marvel outperformed expectations by over 1,700%. It’s a testament to the enduring allure of Michelangelo’s mastery, and perhaps a reminder that leg day pays off (I am seriously on a roll rn).

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3. The Rothschild Vienna Mahzor – $5.7 million

Back at Sotheby’s, a 15th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript, the Rothschild Vienna Mahzor, enchanted bidders with its gilded pages and rich history. This rare Ashkenazic prayer book, adorned with vibrant lapis blues and whimsical creatures, sold for $5.7 million. It’s not just a religious text; it’s a luminous artifact of cultural heritage, bridging centuries with its artistry and devotion.

Market Musings: Old Masters, New Momentum

So, what does this all mean for the art market in early 2026? In a word: vitality. These sales underscore a robust appetite for Old Masters, with collectors eager to invest in works that combine historical significance with aesthetic brilliance. The impressive totals—$30.5 million at Christie’s and $17.9 million for a single drawing at Sotheby’s, highlight a market that’s not just surviving but thriving. It seems that in a world of fleeting digital trends, the timeless appeal of a well-rendered lion or a meticulously illuminated manuscript still holds sway… and thank God for that.

As we step into 2026, the art world reminds us that while styles evolve and technologies emerge, the allure of masterful craftsmanship remains eternal. Whether it’s a sketch by Rembrandt or a manuscript from the 1400s, these works continue to captivate, inspire, and, yes, command top dollar.

Stay tuned for more artful adventures in 2026.

With love,

The Art Girl